Assistant Professor of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Disclosure statement

Paul J. Maginn is a Board Member of Sexual Health Quarters (formerly Family Planning WA), an independent non-profit organisation based in Perth, Western Australia, that provides specialist services in sexual health and reproductive services.

Aleta Baldwin receives funding from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Society for Family Planning.

Barbara Brents has received funding from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and from the City of Las Vegas for other projects.

Crystal Jackson receives funding from her college to support other research projects. She formerly sat for one year on the board of the Red Umbrella Project, a sex worker rights organization in NYC.

If this were the case, you would think that people who consumed a lot of porn would hold particularly negative views towards women.

So we decided to study a group of men whom we’ve dubbed “porn superfans” – those who are so enthusiastic about porn that they’ll attend the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. We wanted to compare their attitudes about gender equality to those of everyday Americans.

Profiling the superfans

Our study was inspired, in part, by the journalists and politicians who have said that porn consumption is at epidemic levels – so much so that it constitutes a public health crisis.

They write and speak of the perils of porn addiction and objectification, how porn encourages “hatred of women” and “sexual toxicity.”

Would this play out in the results of our study?

The 294 expo attendees we surveyed certainly differed from the general population in a number of ways.

Their average age was 44 years old. Almost half – 47.3% – indicated that they watched porn “less than once a day, but more than once a week.” Over one-third – 36.1% – indicated they watch porn “every day.” In other words, over 80% of the attendees in our sample watched porn multiple times a week. Only 34.1% of them were married, but they were highly educated: 60.5% had a college degree or higher.

We compared these results to the results from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted every couple of years that charts social trends.

This survey only asks whether people have seen an X-rated movie in the last year, and 37.6% of the men indicated that they had. Just over half of the men in the General Social Survey sample were married, while just 28.7% of them had a college degree or higher.

Misogyny unmasked?

But we were most interested in comparing the gender attitudes of each group. So we asked the expo attendees the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with four statements from the General Social Survey:

“A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.”

“Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.”

“It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”

“Because of past discrimination, employers should make special efforts to hire and promote qualified women.”

After parsing the results, we discovered that male porn superfans actually expressed more progressive attitudes towards gender equality on two of the questions. For two others, they indicated just as progressive – or, said another way, just as sexist – attitudes as the general population.

Over 90% of porn superfans – compared to just over 70% of the GSS sample – agreed that working mothers can have just as warm and secure relationships with their children than non-working mothers.

For the statement that men and women should hold traditional gender roles within a family, 80% of porn superfans disagreed. Nationally, 73% percent of respondents disagree with this statement.

A similar proportion – 80% – of AVN Expo attendees and General Social Survey respondents disagreed with the statement that men, rather than women, were more emotionally suited for politics.

Although a majority of porn superfans and General Social Survey respondents – 72.4% and 74.5%, respectively – agreed that women, due to past discrimination, should get special preference in the workplace, this was the least supported statement we tested. Notably, however, this level of support is higher than a recent national poll indicating that 65% of Americans support affirmative action for women.

Porn crisis or moral panic?

These findings challenge what porn scholars call the “negative effects paradigm,” which sees porn as an inherently bad thing that cultivates harmful attitudes.

Our survey isn’t the only one that upends this way of thinking. A 2016 study based on General Social Survey data found that male porn consumers held more egalitarian views on women in position of power, women working outside the home, and abortion than those who didn’t view porn.

And while most porn is produced and consumed by men, a growing number of women – straight and LGBTQ – are producing porn and consuming different genres of porn, a trend that’s largely been ignored.

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Ovidie is a French feminist who published a book about the ignorance of pornography. Her documentary Pornocracy is an exploration of porn’s multinational corporations and their exploitation of performers.
(Courtesy of Pornocracy)